Day: May 22, 2014

Tanks are a long distance weapon, you know. They are best used in concert with one another to provide cover and overwatch fire, and are best placed in a covered or hull-down position where their profile is reduced to the minimum. Tanks should never travel alone; they should always advance with supporting vehicles on their flanks.

That’s pretty much what I said to my teammates that Saturday morning. However, I may have typed it a little more tersely. Something like, “%#$&@ idiots. Y R U in the open w/o support?”

I watched as the majority of them rushed across the field to be picked off in the open by well-placed enemy tanks, and turned into smoldering wrecks that dotted the battlefield. Don’t these people know anything about basic tank doctrine, I wondered? Well, probably not. This is the internet, after all.

Still, I want to shout out. Tanks are not close-range weapons. Or rather, they weren’t intended to be. This isn’t paintball. You can’t exactly sneak around in 25 or 30 tons of metal. But you can be clever and use the terrain to your advantage: peek carefully around corners, over rises, and stay hidden in bushes while you wait.

But there they were – half the team racing towards the enemy flag like heavy-metal Rambos, ignoring terrain, elevation, cover, overwatch or even one another. And paying the price. Boom! Another teammate in flames. You might have heard me swearing as you walked by the house that morning.

That left me with three others out of an initial 15 to guard the base; trying to cover all possible paths of approach, stay hidden and stay alive. And pick off the enemy, now bold enough to move forward. An enemy which still had nine intact vehicles, including a very active artillery and two tank destroyers, each with two kills each already. A team that seemed to understand how to play much better than our side.

We lost that one.

Good thing it’s just a game and the losers merely have to wait it out until the match ends, then come to life and play again. When there’s no other penalty for dying except to wait, you won’t learn anything.

Diego’s Quotes

"No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual phil-anthropic distinctions."Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Ch. 11: Higher Laws